Constipation Emergencies on the Rise

Roughly one-in-five Americans affected and 500,000 seek care at ERs.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The number of people going to U.S. emergency rooms for constipation has been increasing, and so has the cost of those visits, which reached $1.6 billion in 2011, according to a new study.

"Constipation is often thought of as not a serious disease -- particularly among doctors. Patients complain about it but it's often not thought of as being medically that relevant," said Dr. Anthony Lembo, the study's senior author, from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

His team's previous research found that a large number of people were being hospitalized for constipation, and that led them to examine ER visits for the same issue, Lembo told Reuters Health in a phone interview.

Constipation affects an estimated 12% to 19% of the U.S. population, Lembo and colleagues wrote in a March 24 online article in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Using data from more than 950 U.S. hospitals, the researchers estimated that there were 497,034 ER visits for constipation during 2006. In 2011, there were 703,391 visits, an increase of about 42%, compared with the 22% increase in overall ER visits during that time, the researchers wrote.

Infants and the elderly were most likely to wind up in the ER for constipation, which mirrors the condition's prevalence in general, Lembo said.

Accounting for inflation, the cost of those visits also rose by about 56% per patient, from about $1,500 in 2006 to about $2,300 in 2011.

Those numbers, the authors say, suggest that about $1.6 billion was spent on ER care for constipation in 2011.

The study can't explain why people come to the ER with constipation, Lembo said.

His team thinks there are probably several reasons why visits for constipation increased, including an increase in the number of people on government-funded insurance, who may be more likely to seek treatment at an ER and less likely to purchase over-the-counter treatments for constipation.